BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Always, it was justice. Justice to all who were in need of justice. Editorial obituary for Louis Marshall, Syracuse Post-Standard, 1929.

The failed European revolutions of 1848 gave the US a generation of radical immigrants, principally from the German states. Many of them settled around St. Louis, bringing their expertise in Bier und Wein and acting with gallantry and style to keep Missouri in the Union during the troubled winter of 1860-61. They had seen one aristocratic Junker class triumph in 1848 and had no taste for another. Another radical German family, the Marschalls, didn’t make it to St. Louis but stopped in Syracuse, NY, where their son Louis Marshall (the spelling was anglicized) was born on December 14, 1856. Louis learned his English at PS 7 in Syracuse and went on to master French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and later in life Yiddish. He apprenticed in the law, attended Columbia Law School, and joined firms in Syracuse and then New York City. Helped along by talented senior partners and his own legal acumen, Louis had by 1910 reached the top of his profession and was considered (by President Taft) for appointment to the US Supreme Court. That never happened, and so we remember Louis Marshall as an extremely successful corporate lawyer who sidelined spectacularly in civil rights law, counsel pro bono for the ACLU, AJC, and NAACP (for which latter he also served as director). In his spare time Louis crusaded for conservation, particularly the preservation of his beloved Adirondacks district. He was the founding donor of Syracuse University’s forestry school (still housed in Marshall Hall) and the state’s Ranger School, the author of Amendment 14 of the New York state constitution that set aside public lands “forever,” and (as a pro bono counsel filing amicus curiae) played a critical role in a landmark Supreme Court case that (in 1920) established the power of the US government to protect public domain lands against the onslaught of various pests, insect or human. And Louis Marshall was a lifelong Republican. ©

[Stanley]

The music of the people is like a rare and lovely flower growing amidst encroaching weeds. Anton Dvorak, Music in America, 1895.

Children growing up in Des Moines, at least those who attended Greenwood Grade School, were taught that Anton Dvorák’s New World Symphony was inspired by his stay with the Moravians of Spillville, Iowa. Doubtless the story helped teachers keep 3000 kids quiet (nay, rapt) when the music was played at the annual Minneapolis Symphony’s Schools Concert in Des Moines’ cavernous KRNT Theater. That year, 1955 I think, Greenwood sat in the front row. In truth the symphony was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic when Dvorák was at New York’s National Conservatory, and by the time he arrived in Spillville (in the summer of 1893) it was finished. The premiere would take place that winter, in New York, on December 15, 1893, and by all accounts it was a howling success. Whether the country was then ready for Dvorák’s message is another question. American racism had hit one of its peaks, or troughs, by 1893 a poisonous brew of anti-black, anti-Indian, and anti-immigrant bile, and Dvorák’s view that their songs were the music of our spheres might not have been universally accepted. But the music echoes with the plantation songs of the black South (the horn solo in the Largo) and pounds with Indian drums (or if you prefer their horses’ hooves) at several points, among other American references. Dvorák, already in Moravia the prophet of the idea that the music of the folk is the music of the nation, could not resist our wondrous, creative diversity. And he did write something in that Spillville summer. He wrote two chamber pieces that he called “American” and “Spillville”, and his opera “Rusalka” was inspired by the sight of a girl bathing nude in the Turkey River, where the composer himself fished and swam. Back in New York, the huge success of the symphony moved the composer to buy his son Otakar a working model of the ocean liner Majestic, for a cool $45 (over $1000 today). So perhaps it should be called the Christmas Symphony. ©

[The hotel at New Prague, MN makes the same claim, he stayed there at one point. I was thrown out of the bar there for smoking my pipe. Cigarettes were allowed and cigars but no pipes!. SCG]

[Stanley]

Some say in hope of rule for his niece/ he hath refused to be king over Greece. "Ingoldsby," circa 1825.

In a Europe convulsed by La révolution of 1789 (and then disrupted by the march of the Armée revolutionaire française), the birth of the third son (and 8th child) of a minor German prince might have seemed a small matter. He was born on December 16, 1790 and baptized (as soon as possible) as Prince Leopold George Chretian Frederick, confirmed a Lutheran in 1805. But in the same year the family had to flee the French army and vacate their little throne, a and that seemed to be that. But Prince Leopold, by all accounts a dashing and handsome boy, took a commission in the Russian army and in due course got his revenge on the French. But the throne of Saxe-Coburg went to his older brother, and Leopold found himself at loose ends in London, out of cash and living above a grocer’s premises. But he had dash and he had nerve and he had that grand Russian uniform and he swept the English princess Charlotte right off her feet, a major dynastic event as she was, for a time, the heir apparent to the British throne. She died almost immediately, leaving Leopold with a good income and vaunting dynastic ambitions which he first satisfied by taking on his niece-by-marriage, the Princess Victoria (the next heir apparent) as unofficial ward (Victoria called him “Dearest Father” when she wasn’t furious with him). Meanwhile, in 1831, he’d become accidental King of an accidental country, Belgium, and soon embarked on a fantastic career of dynasty building that, most famously, included the 1840 marriage of his nephew Prince Albert to his niece Queen Victoria. But in a busy lifetime that did not end until 1865, he married nearly his whole family off into leading European monarchies, including the Hapsburgs of Austria (for his eldest son, also Leopold), the French, and the Portuguese. He was also, all things considered, a pretty good king, the Prince Albert of Belgium so to speak. His son, Leopold II, was not, but then dynasties are like that. ©

[Stanley]

Morality is seldom a safe guide for human conduct. Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop, 1978.

After their misjudgments in reporting the 2016 campaign, American broadcast journalists might profit from reading Penelope Fitzgerald’s Human Voices (1980), set in Broadcasting House, London, during WWII. Underlying its deft comedy is Fitzgerald’s conviction that the BBC’s reporters struggled to tell the truth even in the war’s darkest hours. We gave the novel to my father for Christmas that year. I wrote on the flyleaf that it was her first novel and that she was a (pretty miraculous) beginner. But it was her third, and it had followed two landmark biographies, and all this productivity came in a rush, late in life. Indeed, Penelope Fitzgerald was born a century ago, December 17, 1916, at the Bishop’s Palace, Lincoln, where her maternal grandpapa was bishop. Her other grandfather was Bishop of Manchester, but a clerical career did not beckon to a girl born in 1916. So instead Penelope Hicks went to Oxford, earned a starred First in English, went to work for the BBC, married an Irish Guards officer (Desmond Fitzgerald) in wartime, mothered three kids, and after the war helped keep the family afloat financially with part-time teaching and occasional journalism, much of it in Punch. (Her father was editor so she submitted under a pseudonym). At age 58, as Desmond was dying, came her first book, a biography of the Victorian artist Edward Burne-Jones, and then (1975-82) a creative flood of two biographies and four novels, including Human Voices and a Booker Prize winner, the semi-autobiographical Offshore (1979). After all that, she settled down a bit, writing deeply-researched historical novels set in (inter alia) Renaissance Italy, Edwardian Cambridge, pre-Revolutionary Russia, and (her masterpiece) Romantic-era Germany. She died in 2000. By all accounts Penelope Fitzgerald was a lovely person, gently spoken, wryly humorous and (given her accomplishments) unbecomingly modest. ©

[Stanley]

Peace on earth, and mercy mild, God and sinners reconciled. Charles Wesley.

After the pioneers (Harvard, William & Mary, Yale), a passel of American universities were founded in the mid to late 18th century, and (looking to Britain for models) found no reason to emulate Oxford or Cambridge, by-words for dissipation, drunkenness, and debauchery. So we got the Scottish model and the 4-year degree. Back in England, Charles Wesley came to the same conclusion (about Oxford), and so we got Methodism. Charles Wesley was born into an Anglican cleric’s very large family on December 18, 1707. He was premature and frail, but Samuel and Susanna did not give up on him, kept him warm and nursed, and at two months he opened his eyes to the world and cried. Twenty years later, at dissipated Oxford, led astray by boon companions and London actresses (and perhaps a high tory Jacobite to boot), Charles Wesley opened his eyes again to the world and cried. Helped by his brother John, Charles reapplied himself to his studies and became serious about his religion, attended divine services almost daily, and became well known or his attractive combination of whimsical good humor and vivacity, but also for his “pious extravagancies.” And it was on a mission to Georgia, in America, that on May 21, 1738 Charles Wesley found (in a sudden conversion that took place in a Moravian settlement) a “New Life.” Methodism per se wasn’t yet born, but a methodically Christian approach to life’s problems and promises was. It was the kind of new life that, back in England, and with Charles’s enthusiasm (not to mention his hymnody) and John’s persistence would lead by steps to the ‘methodist’ movement and, eventually, a new protestant episcopal church that would be strong in Britain and with its ‘democratic’ insistence on human capabilities would sweep the boards in the new republic across the water. ©

[Stanley]

Differences in aptitude and personality. . . are largely the result of cultural and other experiential factors. Anne Anastasi, 1937.

Anne Anastasi was born into New York’s immigrant Italian community on December 19, 1908. Her father died when she was a baby, and to keep Anne her mother Theresa became office manager for the city’s Italian language newspaper, Il progresso. Theresa, who had only a high school education (supplemented by a bookkeeping qualification), home-schooled her daughter at first, but by the time this bright child was nine determined that she could no longer cope. New York’s PS 33 had a hard time deciding what grade Anne belonged in (she was precociously ahead in some areas, behind in others), but finally decided on an accelerated education that led to a PhD in psychology, at Columbia, aged only 22. As a psychologist (mainly at Fordham), Anne became the “guru” of psychometry, her Psychological Testing (1954) still something of a bible in the field. But, perhaps remembering her own oddly-paced childhood, Anne Anastasi became equally famous for her strict definitions of the limits of testing and her profound doubts about its predictive powers. Not for her the scary idea that charmed President Nixon, that through testing you could identify future criminals (and other oddballs) at an early age and subject them to preventative therapy. For Anne Anastasi, psychometer extraordinaire, a well-designed test could tell you something significant about the subject only on the day of the test. How the subject got there, and where they were likely to go in future, were questions to be answered (if at all) by other means than testing. That was biography, and it would be the product of all the oddities, twists, and turns of the subject’s life. Dr. Anastasi remained active throughout her own long and well-biographed life, became the third woman president of the American Psychological Association in 1972, received the National Medal of Science in 1987, and died in 2001. ©

[Stanley]

He is a real national loss. A better, kindhearted or more simple, unassuming man never breathed. Queen Victoria, on the death of Thomas Cubitt, 1855.

In my later years of research in London’s libraries, I stayed with graduates of Grizedale College, but before I acquired that inestimable asset West Central London was my base, usually in a University of London residence. There one of my subtler pleasures was to take long walking detours on my way to or from (say) the British Museum, for some of the terraces, squares, and streets of WC1 and W1 are among the city’s treasures. The best of them seem today the very definition of architectural understatement, whispering respectable quiet and privacy to the raffish, noisy, public city. There is a certain similarity about them, too, but little did I know that many were designed (measured, so to speak) and built by the providentially named Thomas Cubitt. Cubitt was born into a carpenter’s family on December 20, 1788, and invested his profits from a spell of ships’ carpentering for the East India Company in a venture that would transform London and remodel the building trade. His first big splash was the London Institution, but he’d already been at work in what were then the suburbs of Islington and Stoke Newington, bringing under his own employ and direction all the skilled trades. By the time he’d finished, in 1855, Cubitt had left his monuments (some of them modest) in Belgrave, Bedford, and Tavistock Squares, and established a clientage among the great names of the land, not least the Grosvenors and then, finally, the royal family, remodeling even Buckingham Palace (the east front is his), building Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, and with his progressive ideas about smoke abatement and sewage disposal (as well as house design and neighborhood planning) working with Prince Albert on the architectural projects surrounding the Great Exhibition of 1851. Thomas Cubitt refused a peerage, but the families have continued contact; his great-great-great granddaughter is Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. ©

[Stanley]

her form all full// As though with magnanimity of light, // Yet a most gentle woman; who can tell // Which of her forms has shown her substance right? W B Yeats, "A Bronze Head". 1939.

In the decades leading up to the 1921 creation of the Free State, Irish nationalism attracted a caravanserai of fellow travelers, poets and mystics, Gaelic romantics and socialist ideologues, Protestants and atheists, actors and playwrights, and the occasional revolutionary to compensate for the occasional reactionary. At one point or another, or several, in her bizarre and brave career, Maud Gonne was or became all of these things, and probably a couple more. Maud was born into the English middle class in Farnham, Surrey, 150 years ago today, on December 21, 1866. Her father Thomas, a British army officer, was soon posted to Ireland where her mother died (of TB) and where young Maud Gonne became an ardent nationalist. Her conversion to the cause was romantic, and may have been intensified by her belief that she was poor. Then at age 21 she inherited a fortune in trust funds and rents (from her mother’s estate) and could afford to be a romantic revolutionary. But Maud was no fool. Eccentric to a degree, intelligent, articulate, and quite beautiful, she agitated in public for the Irish cause (or, as she saw it, causes), attracted lovers—a couple of whom left her with children—and most famously fell in with the poet W. B. Yeats (whose attractions included his membership in the Irish Brotherhood). At first the relationship was platonic (they later called it “astral”) but after 20 years of ups and downs it was consummated physically in 1908. As a physical affair it soon ended, although at the time of the Easter Rising Yeats proposed marriage first to Maud and then to her daughter (named Iseult from an earlier enthusiasm). Maud kept on her course for a long lifetime, dying in 1953. The crowds who followed her coffin to Glasnevin Cemetery remembered Maud Gonne for her courage. Today she is remembered mainly for her relationship with Yeats, who wrote 80 poems about her. ©

[Stanley]

High thinking is the outcome of fine and independent living, and for that the professional chair offers no special opportunities. Havelock Ellis.

Hell, according to George Bernard Shaw, is full of amateurs. Possibly so, but the aphorism would not have worried Grote Reber, who at an early age became an atheist. This prince of all amateurs was born on December 22, 1911, in Wheaton, IL. In 1932, while a student at Illinois Institute of Technology (then the Armour Institute), Reber heard of Karl Jansky’s discovery of radio signals emanating from outer space, and decided to investigate. Graduating from IIT as a qualified electrical engineer, he took freelance work with various Chicago radio stations while, in his back yard, he fiddled around with radio wave receivers. After various failed experiments. he came up with a homemade design in 1937 that worked. So Grote Reber, aged 26, became the world’s only radio astronomer, an amateur for sure (in 1940 he turned down an offer of employment from the Yerkes Observatory), and by 1941 he had finished the first radio frequency sky map. After WWII the field became crowded, and Reber’s 9-meter radio telescope began to look quite small and very primitive, but by this time he was becoming a professional, and research grants took him first to DC, then West Virginia (where I think you can still see his first invention), and finally Tasmania where special atmospheric conditions enabled him (during southern winters) to play around with very long radio waves. Reber lived there the rest of his life, dabbling also in energy-efficient housing (he built his own, of course, in the 1960s), and endearing himself to the locals. Reber, a persuasive critic of the Big Bang Theory (he argued that the universe was forever), was by then an admitted professional (and prophet) in his field. He died at 91 and at his request his ashes were distributed among eighteen famous radio telescope sites from England to Puerto Rico to Hawaii to India where, presumably, they continue to absorb radio signals from outer space. ©

[Stanley]

No person is your friend who demands your silence or denies your right to grow. Sarah Breedlove Walker.

“Wealthiest Negress Dead” was the obituary headline in the New York Times on May 26, 1919. On the other hand, today, a website identifies her simply as “American businesswoman and philanthropist.” One can read into that a transitional prose, an improving competence in coping with American diversities. But in her own time, Sarah Breedlove Walker, aka Madame C. J. Walker, was a Negress through and through. Born in rural Louisiana on December 23, 1867, she was the first freedom child in her family, but in her youth and young adulthood (in New Orleans, Vicksburg, Denver, and St. Louis) Sarah experienced most of the slings and arrows that her race and her poverty could possibly bring her. Employed (first as a general domestic and then as a laundress) from age 10, already married three times and with a growing daughter, Sarah fetched up in St. Louis where her brothers were barbers and where, at about the time of the 1904 World’s Fair, she became a saleswoman for the black-owned Poro Company, dealing mainly in cosmetics and hair products. Another move in 1905, and now married to Charles Walker in Denver, “Madam C. J. Walker” set up for herself in the cosmetics business. With Mr. Walker’s and her daughter’s help, the business grew rapidly. By 1910 there was a factory and a training college (training salespeople and “Beauty Culturists”) in Indianapolis, and a huge sales force of commission agents taking her products nationwide and into the Caribbean. Nearly but never quite a millionaire (her daughter A’Lelia would reach that milestone), Sarah moved to Harlem and, from a New York base, used her business empire to promote black women into positions of power and used her fortune to support both the civil rights and the educational aspirations of all African-Americans. ©

[Stanley]

Magna Farta. Attributed to Oliver Cromwell, who may have said it.

For one reason and another, it seems a good year to contemplate the reign of the man who was, by scholarly judgment and popular legend, England’s worst king. This was King John, who reigned from 1199 to his death in 1216, 800 years ago, and so besmirched the name that there would be no John II. Born on December 24, 1166, John was the youngest son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, and not expected to cause much trouble. Divvying up his various estates, Henry left John with nothing, so John Lackland he became. But the Angevins were such stout practitioners of murder, rebellion, and usurpation that John became a trusted son, second only to the lion-hearted Richard, and (aged only 11) was made Lord of Ireland. When Richard ascended to the throne, in 1189, John got more titles and more lands (in England and France), but hungered for more. He mounted a rebellion, survived that, and with Richard off killing infidels in Bethlehem John began his campaigns to add to his wealth and power, campaigns that became permanent after Richard’s death and John’s accession to the English throne and the French titles. There was probably no Robin Hood, but John did imprison, murder, and starve to death several of his enemies, taking their lands into the bargain, and became so universally ill-loved that the “free men of England” (aka the barons and lords) met John at Runnemede and extracted from him a very long promise (the Great Charter of 1215) that in future he would be and behave like a gentleman. Towards them, at least. But he wasn’t and couldn’t, the civil wars resumed, and in the next year John died. Shakespeare later said it was poison, which was a good guess, but it was probably just plain dysentery. His many enemies believed John had gone to Hell to make that place even fouler, and they may have been right. He was better qualified for that job than for kingship. ©

[Stanley]

I may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing, but if paid at all, I shall never do a man's work for less than a man's pay. Clara Barton.

Fairfax Station, Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Petersburg, Cold Harbor: surely there were few Union soldiers who knew all these battles, and more. But Clarissa “Clara” Barton did. Her Civil War began in a small way, bringing medical supplies to Massachusetts soldiers who’d been injured or wounded as they passed through Maryland. By 1864, having seen battle, found romance (with Col. John Elwell), and narrowly missed being killed herself, Clara was appointed “lady in charge” of the frontline hospitals of the Army of the James, Ben Butler commanding. It was a high point, but not the only one, of Clara Barton’s odyssey towards equality, a journey that began with her birth, in Massachusetts, on Christmas Day, 1821. She was an inordinately shy child, sometimes pathologically so, but it wasn’t for want of trying, on her part, or lack of encouragement, on her family’s part. Educated with her brothers, she played boys’ games with success, and at 17 was a registered teacher. She moved about, too, teaching in Canada and Georgia and founding New Jersey’s first free school in 1852. In 1855 she became the first (and only) woman clerk at the US Patent Office, only to be fired because of her politics (she became a “black Republican”). So she was in place and ready to roll when the Civil War began. Come the peace, Clara went on to found (and run) the Office of Missing Soldiers, helping relatives to find the remains of thousands of MIAs (including a harrowing stint at Andersonville prison’s burying ground), to join Frederick Douglass in his campaign for black equality, and to serve in the Prussian medical corps during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. This last was an experience that led to Clara Barton’s most famous achievement, the founding of the American branch of the International Red Cross in 1881, and the continuation (still in high gear) of a life of service that did not end until 1912. ©

[Stanley]

And all the air a solemn stillness holds. Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," 1751.

Among my Christmas gifts: Lynn Hunt’s book on the importance of the passions, notably empathy, in Inventing Human Rights, shaping our modern view that those rights are or ought to be universal. The epistolary novel was crucial, as readers identified with the triumphs and tragedies of Richardson’s Clarissa or Rousseau’s Julie by “listening in” on their private correspondences. And letter writing was indeed becoming a more intimate form of communication. We know this from many 18th-century biographies, for instance that of the poet Thomas Gray, born on December 26, 1716. Gray’s own epistolary exchanges (notably with his school friend Horace Walpole) allow us a full understanding of his innermost passions. But Gray found a better way to convey even to the coldest heart that the lives of very ordinary people—much like ourselves—are worthy of our lively sympathy. In his “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, we learn that the humble folk buried there, “th’unhonour’d Dead,” had still done their work, sowed their seeds, wept their tears, and accepted their children’s eager kisses. The poem lived on as a classic because ordinary people found themselves illustrated in how one’s world and fate could end in a “neglected spot . . . far from the madding crowd,” and in an unremarked grave, for

Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

And so a century later and thousands of miles to the west, in the summer of 1860 and on the eve of his presidency, when asked about his prior life, Abraham Lincoln looked back on his youth as comprising nothing more than “the short and simple annals of the poor.” But surely Lincoln understood that his own life was nothing less, either, and that it had thus already embodied the noble ironies of Thomas Gray’s immortal elegy. ©

[Stanley]

An unmitigated, protracted libel upon Irish peasant men and, worse still, upon Irish girlhood. From a Dublin review of Synge's Playboy of the Western World.

Having already this year noted the birth dates of Annie Horniman (Oct. 3) and Maude Gonne (Dec. 21) it seems only right to approach the end of 2016 with a salute to the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. It was a venture in which both were heavily involved and, like Maude and Annie (both English to their roots) it embodied the contradictions and confusions of Irish nationalism. The Abbey first opened its doors on December 27, 1904, headlining two short plays: W. B. Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand and Lady (Isabella Augusta) Gregory’s Spreading the News. Also involved, more or less heavily and more or less from the Abbey’s beginning, were J. M. Synge, George Bernard Shaw, Seán O’Casey, and George William Russell (aka “Æ”), with James Joyce firing an occasional satirical broadside from Paris. Such a crew!!! The whole venture was integral to the Irish national (cultural) revival as well as to Irish nationalism, and Dublin’s theatre-goers (in these early years a very mixed population) understood that nationalism in one or another (or more) of its guises would be on the playlist. And the Abbey, as a good theatre putting on good drama, could also depend on offending one section or another (or more) of this audience on any given night. Perhaps its most spectacular offense came in January 1907, when Synge’s Playboy of the Western World provoked a riot (no, really, a real riot) from among those in the audience who venerated the perfections, purities, and pristineness of Irish (Gaelic) rural society. We may call the rioters the Sinn Feín brigade and chide them for their obtuseness, but then, in 1911, Synge’s play was closed down in New York City for roughly similar reasons. Despite these provoked tensions, come Irish independence the Abbey Theatre (“Amharciann Na Manistreach”) became the first state-supported theatre in the Anglophone world. The Abbey is still today the “National Theatre of Ireland.” Next time you’re in Dublin, go there. ©

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In vertebrate paleontology, increasing knowledge leads to triumphant loss of clarity. Alfred Romer, 1962.

Amateur observers could be forgiven for deciding that there are two great branches of paleontology, the scientific and the historical. And it seems that in my lifetime the “science” side has made the running, with the discovery of more and more exact dating techniques (using the radioactive half-lives of various isotopes, most famously Carbon 14, more usefully Potassium 40) and the even more dramatic findings that have flowed from Crick and Watson’s unraveling of the structure of the “genetic material,” DNA. We can now trace through time many species’ evolutionary descent “beyond reasonable doubt.” But the paleontologist Stephen J. Gould—himself a field worker in fossils—never tired of warning that the “merely” historical side of his science retained great explanatory power. One of Gould’s favorite examples was his predecessor at Harvard, Alfred Romer, long-time (1946-70) director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Romer was born in New York on December 28, 1894, and from his education (at Amherst and Columbia) determined that anatomical and embryological history were of central significance in studying evolution. Combining meticulous study of living species with exhaustive work in the fossil record, Romer focused his attention on the early vertebrates and their transition from aquatic to terrestrial life, from fish to amphibian. His discoveries relating to the necessary and/or likely relationships between form and function gave us our best picture yet as to how some of these creatures actually lived and, for the most part, have correctly predicted the more “exact” evolutionary findings of white-coated, lab-based molecular biologists and nuclear physicists. Yet Romer also gloried in the accidents and uncertainties of his approach to evolution, uncertainties that led him (early in his career) to anticipate the theory of continental drift. ©

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We're lucky in Britain to have a lot of amateur palaeontologists and they keep up the traditional field studies and fossil-hunting. And one thing they often remind us is that most of the fossils we find are the result of disasters rather than the day to day deaths of animals and plants. Another is that we often make a lot of conclusions from a very small number of fossils from any given species, especially in the case of early humanoid species.

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Mother indulgent. Said I have a queer mind and have read too much. Not true. Have read little and understood less. From the last chapter of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. . . .

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face. He was a baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.

Paul Cohen, my undergraduate roommate, used to recite these lines, and more, from the first pages of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It was recitation from memory, and Paul loosed it off often enough that I can almost do it myself. But not quite, and it’s a pity, for these lines were (if not the launch) then an early broadside of a literary modernism that would inspire a host of writer-creators including my own personal hero, William Faulkner. And it was appropriate that Joyce fired it off right bang in the middle of that very modern horror, the Great War. The Portrait was published on December 29, 1916, just as the senseless slaughter at Verdun dragged to its exhausted, inconclusive end. Joyce was by then 34, perhaps a little long in the tooth for personal Declarations of Independence, but that’s what the Portrait was. From “baby tuckoo” emerged Stephen Dedalus, clearly James Joyce’s fictional self, who in the space of a single fiction liberated himself and, to translate the Latin quote on the frontispiece (from Ovid), “turned his mind to unknown arts.” It was not an easy liberation and it was not an easy book, long in gestation, finished once in 1904 and then literally saved from the fire (by Joyce’s sister, Eileen), it was drastically shortened and then taken up by Ezra Pound (on the recommendation of W. B. Yeats) and serialized (in 1914) before a New York publisher, B. W. Huebsch, released it as a book exactly one century ago. If you have yet to read it, therefore, you are behind the times. ©

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To obtain a true idea of earthquake motion is a matter of cardinal importance. John Milne, Earthquakes and Other Earth Movements, 1886.

The rapid modernization of Japan under the “enlightened rule” (Meiji) of the emperor who defeated the Shogunate is among the more dramatic stories of modern history. In only a 44-year reign (1868-1912) Japan moved from an isolating feudalism to become one of the world’s great powers, its devastating defeat of imperial Russia (1905) winning it a place at most conference tables. One Meiji tactic was to import western talent, and one of the first imports was a British geologist, John Milne, who arrived in 1875 to take up the newly-created post of Professor of Geology and Mining in Tokyo’s Imperial College. Milne proved a great choice. Only 25 (he was born in Liverpool on December 30, 1850) at the time of his appointment, Milne had already made waves (pun intended) in his relatively new science, with geological surveys of Iceland, Newfoundland, and Labrador. An adventurous sort, he chose to travel across Siberia to take up his chair, married a Japanese woman in 1881 (Tone Milne was the daughter of an eminent Buddhist abbot), and won several important imperial Japanese rewards, not least the Order of the Rising Sun, for his pioneering studies of Japan’s troublesome geology. In 1895 John and Tone Milne retired back to England (the Isle of Wight) where John continued his researches with the help of a generous imperial Japanese pension. What he’s best known for, though, came with his reaction to the Yokohama earthquake of February, 1880. Believing that some more exact means of measuring these tremors was vitally important in order to understand them, prepare for them, even perhaps to predict them, John Milne invented the modern seismograph. In his 18 years of ‘retirement’ he did much to perfect the instrument, to spread it across our fundamentally unstable globe, and to theorize about how best to withstand the shocks it periodically delivers. ©

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My mother felt I had delivered the Burkes from the cotton patch to the White House. Selma Burke, on her 1941 portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

North Carolina’s Republican-led legislature has been in the news recently for its tyrannical behavior in effectively overturning the election of a Democratic governor. But the racist coup d’état is an old North Carolina tradition, going back at least to 1898-99, when the election of the Republican Daniel Russell at the head of a racially mixed “Fusion” party was violently negated by armed mobs professing loyalty to the Democratic Party and with a marked proclivity for murdering black people in the streets. Once in power the mob legislated sweeping changes that disenfranchised black voters and fixed White Supremacy on North Carolina for several generations (and now seems again to be rearing its ugly visage). The violence led to a black exodus from the state, but the large Burke family stayed put. They owned a cotton farm and papa Burke had other irons in the fire (he was, inter alia, a chef on a luxury liner and an AME pastor). So when daughter Selma Burke was born, on December 31, 1900, the 7th of 10 kids, she had her future cut out for her. Her education for ‘service to her people’ began in a leaky, one-room country school and then in a North Carolina nursing college (segregated, of course). But then she did leave, settling in New York City where her childhood interest in art flowered as Selma Burke became a noted sculptor. She was not at all self-taught, not a “folk artist.” The leaders of the Harlem Renaissance were on the lookout for talent, and saw to it that Selma got sophisticated training, and not just in New York (her Columbia MFA came in 1941) but first in Paris. Commissioned in 1941 to do a famous bas relief of FDR, modeled from life, Selma continued her long life of service into the 1990s, founding and running two art schools for inner city youth (in New York and Pittsburgh) and, into the bargain, peppering North Carolina with forceful sculpted portraits of her people who today still wait, it would seem, for democracy. ©

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Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And ne'er brought to mind? Robert Burns, 1788.

On January 1, 42BCE, the Roman Senate deified Julius Caesar, Rome’s late general, consul, and dictator, which shows you what Senates can get up to when left to their own devices. This interesting piece of legislation was perhaps partly apology, for in history’s most famous assassination Caesar had been murdered by Senators, in the Senate. It was part of the transition by which Republican Rome became Imperial Rome, and thus of considerable interest to the founders of the American Republic when, 18 centuries later, they tried to fashion a polity that would not deteriorate into dictatorship or imperium. It also introduced a new chapter in the tangled history of New Year’s Day, for the Senate also declared that New Year’s day was January 1 and that henceforth Rome would run to the “Julian” Calendar. Caesar may or may not have been a god, but he had chutzpah, and in 46BCE, during his seizure of power, he had decided to remake the year, making it into 445 days and 15 months. Remaking the heavens, however, was a harder task than ruining the Republic, and whatever the great Caesar said the moon, planets, and stars kept in their fairly steady paths, the earth’s orbit never came close to 445 days, and the western world landed itself with 17 centuries of dispute over when it was that New Year’s Days should be celebrated (if they were to be celebrated at all, for there have always been cautions to the hilarity). It’s a long story that in the Anglophone world finally boiled down to a fight between January 1 and March 25. Scotland, Anglophone in spite of itself, settled on January 1 in the year 1600, but England and its colonies remained confused until, in 1752, it was decided to scrap the tattered remnants of the God Julius’s calendar. By then it was a minor adjustment, involving the assassination of only ll days, but it finally and officially enshrined January 1 as New Year’s Day. So, Happy New Year!!! ©

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If the house is to be set in order, one cannot begin with the present; he must begin with the past. John Hope Franklin, 1968.

My philosophy prof at Penn was William Fontaine, an older gentleman who despite his formalities of dress and bearing was a model classroom teacher, incisive in his judgments yet gentle in his language. We called him “Bill” behind his back; he seemed someone one might want to know as “Bill,” if only when one were older and wiser. What I didn’t know then (1963) was that he was the only tenured African-American professor in the Ivy League. That has certainly changed, and a leading agent of change was not Fontaine (who despite his excellencies never enjoyed professional prominence) but the historian John Hope Franklin, born in Oklahoma of mixed African-Cherokee parentage on January 2, 1915. His voyage to academic eminence was a long one, but he was steeled to it by the patience and courage of his father, Buck Franklin, a pioneering civil rights lawyer, by a hard education in segregated schools, and by an academic career that for 20 years was restricted to historically black colleges. Then, as it were suddenly, at the time when Bill Fontaine was trying to teach me philosophy, John Hope Franklin was appointed Pitt Professor of American History at Cambridge (a highly prestigious one-year appointment), after which he became professor (and later the chair) of History at the University of Chicago and in due course was elected to the presidencies of the American Studies Association (1967), the Southern Historical Association (1970),the Organization of American Historians (1975), and the American Historical Association (1979). What elevated Franklin to these pinnacles was the mass and brilliance of his scholarship, notably (but by no means only) his From Slavery to Freedom (1947: currently in its 9th edition). In that book Franklin demonstrated that black history was integral to American history, just as his exceptional career helped to advance the idea that black scholars should become unexceptionally part of the American academy. ©

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No man can be a politician except he be first a historian or a traveler; for except he can see what must be or what may be. he is no politician. James Harrington.

Widely acknowledged as one (along with Thomas Hobbes and John Locke) of the three great political theorists of England’s “century of revolution,” James Harrington is today not much read and rarely cited. There are several reasons. His great work, Oceana (1658), lacks philosophical rigor (in which he was not interested) and yet is over elaborate in its prescriptions. Moreover Oceana stands alone, whereas Hobbes’s Leviathan and Locke’s Second Treatise are contextualized by their authors’ other significant writings. Yet it has merit, had influence, and its author’s life was an oddly interesting saga. Born into a well-connected gentry family on January 3, 1611, Harrington was well-provided for by his father’s and mother’s estates, got a good education, cultivated a remarkably genial temper, and in the early 1650s acquired a rambling mansion near Westminister Abbey, mis-named ‘Little’ Ambry, in which (from time to time) lived his three devoted sisters, their families, a brother, his step-mother, and step-siblings. It was also the site of much conviviality between Harrington and a varied posse of friends drawn from almost every political persuasion. In and amongst this menagerie, Harrington conceived and composed Oceana, a utopian work in which he essayed to launch his larger society on calm seas and a prosperous voyage. And this may be the key to the work. Distressed by the upheaval of the Civil Wars (he became personally close to Charles I during the king’s imprisonment and trial), ensconced in the friendly chaos of Little Ambry, James Harrington set out to create in an intellectual fiction, and to prescribe for us, a mathematically balanced social order. Harrington’s constructed balance was far too elaborate, indeed too utopian, but it was an idea to which John Locke would subscribe, and Locke’s heirs, too, the makers of the American constitutions of our own revolutionary era. ©

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Can the physicists' description of reality be considered complete? Title of 2006 lecture given by Brian Josephson.

My physics colleagues at Lancaster University were hot on superconductivity, if you’ll forgive the pun (it’s something that happens best at impossibly low temperatures), and they built a distinguished Physics Department partly on that basis. It’s also interesting because the field, in its theoretical origins, produced one of the youngest Nobelists ever, Brian Josephson. True, Josephson won the Nobel Prize at the advanced age of 33 (he was born in Wales on January 4, 1940), but it was for work done, and insights gained, when he was all of 22 and a graduate student at Cambridge. His discovery, now called the Josephson Effect, was made on the blackboard, so to speak, and generated considerable controversy (including a confrontation at an international conference between the young man and a very eminent Princeton physicist), but was soon confirmed experimentally and now has a wide range of uses in the lab, in medicine, and in astronomy, and I can’t begin to explain it (it’s also called “quantum tunneling”). But it’s an especially interesting story for several reasons, and not just Josephson’s youth. Not least, while the first published paper on the effect and the first commercial patent for it came from other physicists (Americans Philip Anderson and John Rowell), the patent (though potentially hugely valuable) was never enforced and has never been challenged. We might therefore call it a “free radical” among recent scientific discoveries. Meanwhile, Josephson himself has become a controversial figure. His interest in the physics of consciousness, his research into what might best be called ‘paranormal’ physics, his experimental and theoretical defense of homeopathy, and his scientific argument for the existence of a creator, all have embroiled him in occasionally ill-tempered disputes. He himself remains, as he was aged 22, a cheerfully yet tetchily independent thinker.

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I saw something nasty in the woodshed. Aunt Ada Doom, in Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm, 1932.

In England, circa 1920-1940, arose a literary genre sometimes known as “loam and lovechild” fiction, a pale plagiarism of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex novels. Stanley Baldwin, the profoundly conservative prime minister (1924-29), was a prominent aficionado, but it was known as women’s stuff, both its authors and its market. Its purple prose, bucolic themes, and happy endings came in for much satire, even from P. G. Wodehouse, but never more accurately than the 1932 novel Cold Comfort Farm. It’s a great title, much better than the author’s original “Curse God Farm,” and more in keeping with the book’s gentle, yet sharp, satire. Its comedy was so sophisticated that one reviewer thought it came from the pen of Evelyn Waugh. But the author was Stella Gibbons, a sometime journalist who had been producing passable poetry (for T. S. Eliot’s The Criterion, no less), and whose whole writing career would be upstaged, really, by Cold Comfort Farm. Born in London on January 5, 1902, Stella Gibbons’s unhappy childhood may find some echoes in Cold Comfort Farm, in which a thoroughly sophisticated (but impecunious) heiress, “Robert Poste’s child,” descends on her country cousins’ bucolic havoc in rural Howling, Sussex, and proceeds to modernize them all. They are the Starkadders, and they are a study in themselves, barely human one might say and certainly uncouth, and presided over—terrorized, really—by a tyrannical recluse, Aunt Ada Doom, Mrs. Judith Starkadder’s mother. Only 19, Flora Poste rolls up her sleeves and gets to work, even with the Starkadders’ livestock (Viper the horse and Graceless, Aimless, Feckless, and Pointless the cows) and brings order to Howling. Cold Comfort Farm is still in print and still worth a read. Or take in the movie (impeccably adapted by Malcolm Bradbury in 1995) in which Kate Beckinsale is perfect as the redoubtable Flora. ©

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In the land of narrow valleys/ And solemn Sabbath Days,/ And collieries and choirs/ I learnt my people's ways. Idris Davies.

In my mis-spent youth, there was a sudden and, we thought, exciting cross-fertilization between popular and folk music. Bob Dylan, our recent Nobelist, was the most famous exemplar. But there were others. Two of them came together on the Byrds’ hit album of 1965, “Mr. Tambourine Man.” The title song, of course, was by Dylan, but elsewhere on the album one found the melodic and haunting “Bells of Rhymney,” first brought into the folk genre by Pete Seeger in the 1958 album “Pete Seeger and Sonny Terry,” then transferred across to the Byrds via Judy Collins. Dylan himself recorded it, pop style, with The Band (in 1967 and only recently released), but “my” version, so to speak, is the Byrds’ recording even though I later learned that they mispronounced “Rhymney” (in Wales it’s “rumney”). It’s a poem about justice denied, for coal mining disasters:

And who killed the miner?

Say the grim bells of Lina.

and it was written by a Welsh coal miner, Idris Davies, who was born in Rhymney on January 6, 1905, and went down the pits after leaving school. Welsh miners were a literate lot (our copy of Under the Volcano, still blackened with coal dust, is a gift from a coal miner’s daughter, Norette Smith. Her dad read it on his breaks), but Idris was only able to start writing when he retrained as a teacher after the General Strike of 1926 closed his pit. His poetry, praised for its historicity by T. S. Eliot and for its Welshness by Dylan Thomas, appeared first in three volumes (Gwalia Deserta, 1938, The Angry Summer: A Poem of 1926, 1943, and Tonypandy, 1945). Idris Davies died of stomach cancer in 1953. In 1994 the University of Wales paid tribute to him with a Complete Poems. His monuments are littered across the valleys of South Wales. ©